A conventional noticeboard is a means of communication on which notes, notices and the like can be fixed by pins, for example. Usually, noticeboards are local, the messages fixed on them being directed to a particular group of people. A noticeboard is often accessible to anyone who wishes to read a message attached on the noticeboard. The communication is thus not necessarily only directed to a particular person or group but to a larger public as well. This communication is thus of the type “one-to-public”.
Nowadays, the WWW (World Wide Web) service and news groups represent collections of noticeboards on the Internet. A message can be arranged on the noticeboard and anyone can read the message on a private person's or a business company's home page or by visiting a particular news group, for example. The local physical noticeboards have thus changed into global virtual noticeboards.
Compared to interpersonal “one-to-one” communication between people, an advantage of the noticeboard is that a message can be left on the noticeboard without having to bother the person at issue at a given time, but he or she can read the message when convenient, either by visiting the place physically or by visiting the virtual noticeboard by using a WWW browser. Furthermore, no-one can be mistakenly left out of a delivery list since no such list exists. In fact, it is not even necessary to know in advance who will eventually read the message.
WAP (Wireless Application Protocol) is a service which enables a user of a terminal in a mobile telephone system, such as a mobile telephone, to browse a WWW service. In such a case, the HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) of the inner structure and appearance of the hypertext normally used in WWW services is replaced by WML (Wireless Markup Language).
A problem with the new virtual noticeboards is that they are global. On many occasions, being global is an advantage but sometimes it is a disadvantage. A disadvantage, particularly when a WAP terminal is used, is that in order to find the right noticeboard, the user has to use a search engine on the Internet and try to find the right noticeboard by using suitable search words. The problem is real since there are at least billions of pages among which it is difficult to find the desired page if the user does not know the Internet address of the page at issue. Due to the limited capacity of radio resources, it is more expensive to use the WAP terminals than Internet-connected computers utilizing fixed data transmission connections. It would thus be advisable to develop methods of finding the desired virtual noticeboard faster.